For four widows, the one-year mark brings a fresh spasm of grief -- and a
realization that they've somehow figured out how to carry on.

Family Ties: Actress LaChanze Sapp-Gooding was pregnant September 11. She struggles not to show her fury to her children, Cecilia, now 2, and Zaya, 11 months.

By MERYL GORDON
Photos by MARY ELLEN MARK

The Lives Left Behind
For four widows, the one-year mark brings a fresh spasm of grief -- and a
realization that they've somehow figured out how to carry on.
meryl Gordon
It's the stupid, ordinary, day-to-day stuff that is still so brutal. Upper
West Sider Emily Terry recently took her daughter Lucy to the doctor to
discuss whether the 4-year-old's ear problems would require minor surgery.
"The doctor told me, 'So go home and have a family meeting and decide what
you want to do.' "

These would be innocuous words, except that Terry's husband, Andrew Kates,
worked at Cantor Fitzgerald and perished on September 11. "I thought,
This is it, I am the family meeting," says Terry."

For the spouses of those who died in the Twin Towers, a simple encounter can
turn into a trap-door moment that hurls them unexpectedly into bottomless
grief. And yet, while the pain and loss remain excruciating, there is also a
small sense of relief, a sad triumph in merely having survived."

"In one night, I was turned into a mother and a father, a banker and a
carpenter," says Lori Kane, a stay-at-home New Jersey mom whose husband,
Howard Kane, worked at Windows on the World. Her first six months were a
blur, as the shock and constant sobbing turned to bleak recognition and
numbness. But on an August vacation to Puerto Rico with her 12-year-old son,
Jason, Kane found herself musing about how far she'd come. "I've never been
good at being alone, my whole life. I didn't think I could do this. I can.""

Anna Mojica, whose husband, Manny, was a firefighter based in Greenwich
Village, has received dozens of condolence letters and gifts from strangers,
but the note that really got to her came from a 9-year-old Colorado boy. "He
wrote that the real heroes were the wives and the families left behind," she
says.
"

If their husbands had died of cancer or in a car wreck, their loss would be
equally agonizing, but what's disorienting for these women is all the public
attention being focused on them. It's weird to have cars cruise slowly by
their homes, to have people in the health club whisper and stare, to hear
strangers making judgments about how they should live their lives.
"

Yet it's worse when people don't know. LaChanze Sapp-Gooding, an actress who
was married to Cantor Fitzgerald trader Calvin Gooding and gave birth to
their second child in October, says she doesn't want to spend her life
wearing a sign saying 9/11 widow and explaining her situation. "The saddest
thing about all of this is that my little girl will never meet her father,"
she says. "Most people won't know what happened, and they're going to see me
as yet another African-American single mother in America -- and this wasn't
my plan or choice.""

Now, at the one-year mark, these four women have all been time-warped to the
past, replaying again and again the last moments with their husbands, the
things they said or didn't say, the final, irrevocable image before
everything changed. They are saying good-bye all over again. But they're
also looking to the future, beginning to think about the "What next?"
chapter."

LaChanze Sapp-GoodingActress and mother of two
LaChanze Sapp-Gooding has a light-up-the-room smile and the resilience of a
show-must-go-on Broadway trouper. Sitting in the living room of her
high-floor Riverdale apartment, with a serene view of the Hudson River,
Sapp-Gooding, dressed in a sexy lace top and flowered skirt, is in full
emotional throttle today."

An actress who has been nominated for a Tony Award, she is juggling a
variety of roles, including doting mom to two little kids ("Celia, honey,
mommy's going to talk now, stop trying to break Meryl's tape recorder") and
furious widow ("There are days when I want to take a sledgehammer and crack
every window on Fifth Avenue"). But most of all, she is an artist who has
found solace in immersing herself in fictional characters. "I'm so grateful
that I have a little bit of a name in New York," says Sapp-Gooding, who has
been cast in a revival of the Broadway musical Baby, slated for next
year."

Sapp-Gooding is a member of that most heartbreaking Twin Towers sorority --
widows who were pregnant on September 11. Married to Calvin Gooding, a
trader in international equities at Cantor Fitzgerald, she says, "It meant a
lot for us to raise happy African-American children in this world. We were
on a mission to do this together." Her younger sister, Michelle Mackey, was
at the hospital on October 23 when Sapp-Gooding gave birth to her second
daughter, Zaya. "It was the saddest moment in our lives, but a huge sigh of
relief because we were so worried about the baby," Mackey says."

Sapp-Gooding's face brightens as she talks about how she and Calvin met. It
all began with a head shot and a haircut. "I used to get my hair done at
this salon called Scissors," she recalls. Calvin went there, too, and saw
her photo on the wall, pestering the barber unsuccessfully for her number.
Then, on Memorial Day weekend in 1996, Sapp-Gooding was at the restaurant B.
Smith's with a girlfriend, and Calvin walked by. "He was so handsome. My
girlfriend and I toasted, and we both said, 'I'll drink to that.' " Calvin
strolled into the bar, came by her table, and asked, "Are you an actress?
I've been trying to meet you for two years. Can I take you out for ice
cream, dinner, a trip to the moon?""

But Sapp-Gooding, who grew up in the Florida panhandle and attended the
University of the Arts in Philadelphia, soon accepted a role in the national
production of Ragtime and told Calvin she would be spending the next
year in Los Angeles; she was stunned when he arranged to be transferred to
Cantor's L.A. office. "I didn't know he was that serious about me," she
says. The couple married in 1998."

On September 10, their last night together, their daughter Celia was
fussing, so Calvin went off to sleep in her room, to keep the child quiet so
LaChanze could get some rest. "I remember getting up at 3 a.m. and going to
Celia's room," she says. "He was just laying there, sound asleep on the
floor with her on his chest." She kissed her husband good-bye as he headed
off to work, then fell back to sleep in a recliner, woken with a start by a
call from a family member alerting her of the attacks at the Twin Towers. "I
was watching TV, and I kept counting down the squares to get to his floor,
and there it was.""

Sapp-Gooding says her biggest challenge last fall was to try to hold it
together in front of the children. "After I had the baby, I didn't want to
be angry, because I was nursing. But there were times I was so sad that my
2-year-old would crawl over to me and say, 'Mommy, what's the matter?' But I
couldn't stop crying.""

What brought her back from crippling depression was an acting job, a role in
The Vagina Monologues last December. Offered the part by the play's
author, Eve Ensler, Sapp-Gooding was initially nervous about going back to
work, but says, "I got to be funny and happy and loved for an hour and a
half. It was the best thing for me. It kick-started me back into wanting to
be pretty again, into being LaChanze again, sans husband, sans children,
just me.""

She threw herself into auditions this winter and spring; flying off to
Montreal to do a commercial, landing the Baby role as well as the
lead for a workshop next year of a new musical, Dessa Rose, about an
African-American slave. She has felt pressured to work partially because she
worries about money: Calvin didn't buy life insurance."

She can't help but be upset by the million-dollar disparity between what
civilian spouses and the firefighter and police widows and widowers -- the
beneficiaries of generous pensions and enormous charity donations -- are
receiving. "I don't begrudge them a dime, but the organizers of these funds
ought to consider the rest of us. I've got a long haul ahead of me.""

She remains wary about dating. "I think, I'd like to go to a movie and
have a glass of wine. When I think about being with another man, being
in the space of conversation with a man who may be attracted to me, it makes
me so nervous," she says."

In July, Sapp-Gooding started seeing a psychiatrist, and at his suggestion
she's taking a work break this fall -- with the exception of a one-night
performance at Lincoln Center in November (she'll sing songs -- from "That's
All" to "Mockingbird" -- that reflect her feelings about Calvin and her
children). "My life had gotten ahead of me," says Sapp-Gooding. "I couldn't
catch the reins. I was trying to do too much, and it was affecting my
patience with my children. I was starting to snap at my babies, and I didn't
like it."

"He's been teaching me balance," she says. "He said to me, 'You can talk all
you want about your relationship with Calvin and how he died, but what we're
here to do is work on you. There's no more you and Calvin. We've got to make
you strong again.' I found that comforting.""